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Recently Yahoo search announced the support of X-Robots tag directive in its search engine. Meta tags such as NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET,and NOFOLLOW are very important for indexing search engines. The use of Meta tags will play a key role in Yahoo search by attracting more traffic .When used properly meta tags will instruct the search engine spiders whether or not to index and follow a particular page. The following is a brief explanation of some of the common terms used;-
- INDEX-This directive gives instructions to the search engine robots or the spiders when is the right time to index the page, which basically means you are accepting the search engine to add your page within their search directory
- NOINDEX-By using this tag, you are simply telling the robots that this page cannot be indexed and it will not appear in their search directory
- NOFOLLOW-This directive instructs the robots or spiders not to follow any links found on your page
- NOARCHIVE- This tag is meant to stop your page from been cached , however if you are not interested in your page to be indexed at all, then the "noindex" tag must be implemented.
- NOSNIPPET- This tag instructs Google not to indicate a snippet (description) under your Google listing and it will also not indicate a cached link in the search results.
Robots meta tag is a recent concept evolved by Yahoo search and it has become very popular in a short span of time and is been used in many other search engines. The Robots meta tag is simply a command to the search engine regarding whether to index a given page or not.
The title tag is the one which is visible to the webmaster. Other meta tags such as the keyword tag and the Robots meta tag are just a means of sending data or information to the search engine. Meta tags are used to send information about the content of the website to the search engine. The pages are actually ranked on the basis of the information provided to the search engine in the form of meta tags. Thus, it is very important to give due credit to meta tags. Meta tags that are written properly are very beneficial in search engine optimization or SEO and they have proved very helpful in diverting more traffic to your particular website.
Yahoo search now allows meta tags to be implemented through X-Robots-Tag directive in the Http header, which in turn gives webmasters the flexibility to achieve exclusions on PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint, video, and other file types, including html files, and increasing their coverage through a simplified process. In addition, webmasters don't have to access the html templates in order to show exclusions for html files.
The proper use of meta tags for your website content will bring or attract a lot of visitors and will make huge contributions to the profits of your business or company. Therefore it is very necessary to observe the proper usage of the robots before using or implementing them to your website. If the tags are not used properly, it will lead to spidering errors which cause the robots to systematically ignore your page absolutely.
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